Since my first brush with metal in my early teens, there’s one subgenre I’ve been enamoured with, but explored surprisingly little of: the hugely popular and highly polarising world of black metal. Often (and unfortunately often rightfully) stereotyped as being music created for antisocial bigots by antisocial bigots (see: second wave of black metal), I’ve long felt that it doesn’t get the appreciation it deserves, and great releases are often overlooked because of the style’s strong connotations with racism, homophobia, sexism, and murder. As the years have gone on, we’ve seen splinter genres erupt from traditional black metal’s festering womb, many of which no longer rely on satanism, extreme violence, and social controversy to become popular. We now have sub-subgenres including blackgaze, ambient black metal, transcendental metal, and Christian black metal. While all of these would be considered ‘hipster’ black metal by purists, I’ve always found that these forms that veer away from the traditional first and second wave sound are musically much more interesting, and feature a wider emotional scope as well as far clearer production.
The one great thing about traditional black metal is its indisputable influence on numerous other metal genres, and innumerable individual bands. This has been truer in the past 20 years or so than before that, when its influence was there but a bit more subtle and often limited to bands just playing faster, more aggressively, or adopting harsher vocals. More recently, there’s been some pretty interesting cross-pollination though, which is often greater than the sum of its parts. For example, I find modern death metal to be pretty unexciting and formulaic (with exceptions, of course); but give me blackened death metal and baby, it’s on. The precision, structures, and brutal riffs of death metal colliding with black metal’s visceral, highly-strung nihilism? Hell yeah, that’s the shit. Even so, it’s not too often that an album really pushes what black metal is, and that borrows from so many styles of metal that something really, truly, deeply unique is created. All songs are unique, of course; but I’m talking about bands that challenge the very essence of how we perceive genre. And now we get to the point. Incipient Chaos have managed to do just that.
While the French band has been together since 2014, their self-titled new release is their debut full-length album. I hadn’t heard of them before, but I’ll sure as hell check out everything else they’ve done now, too. There’s a lot about this album I really like – the aforementioned effortless blending of genres obviously being a massive part of that. The production is razor-sharp whilst not coming across as sterile in the slightest, the riffs are sick, each instrument gets a moment to shine. The album’s energy is so visceral; it’s so delightfully complex and yet so totally un-pretentious. I promise not to get too technical with this review from here on out. I’m going to try not to label anything I hear by genre at all, or relate it to any past or present bands. I’m simply going to try and put how Incipient Chaos made me feel into some sort of loosely-structured written form.
Thrust straight into icy chaos, I feel my spine arch and push my ribs outward. Somewhere in between crushing heaviness and buoyancy, I feel a gravitational pull on my sternum, forcing rather than asking me to move forwards, into this cavernous, celestial void. But it’s not a void – it’s more like a neverending fractal of crags, monoliths, specks of crystalline light in amongst a huge bubble of darkness. I feel encapsulated, yet the vastness of this strange world is indescribable. Imagine the psychedelic sequence near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but plunged in hues of slate, blue, cyan, and teal. The scene begins to warp, stretching upwards, rather than outwards, and I begin to look up, to a spot of sky so black it appears to be an abyss, growing ever closer. I can’t tell if I’m floating into it, or if it’s bearing down to devour me.
A rapid push from behind propels me into a pit so violently red, orange, and black that I lose my bearings for a while. I can’t tell if I’m falling or running, but one thing is clear – there’s something behind me, breathing down my neck, an ominous, otherworldly presence. Is it an actual demon, or some sick manifestation of past wrongdoings and unprocessed traumas? I don’t dare turn to look, until the temptation becomes too much, and I twist my neck ever so slightly. Out of the corner of my eye, I see nothing of the sort I had imagined, just an ever-growing cloud of silver and pale blue, its tendrils snaking closer by the second. Somehow, its serene movements are more eerie and so much more disconcerting than I could’ve imagined, so I close my eyes, and keep running forward, ever deeper into this violent fiery cave.
Almost imperceptibly, the scene changes, I can see if even through closed eyelids. I allow myself a peek, and see I’m somehow back on the fractal planet, glacial and fragile, but now bursts of red and orange mar its surface, like falling bombs or bursting sores. It’s terrifying, and beautiful. Almost in slow motion, things erupt and contract again, lazily spewing spires of purple and gold. I finally feel my feet again, and realise I’m sinking; the ground has become tar-like, sticky, thick. I begin to struggle, I panic against the ground’s twisting grip, but I fall to my knees, and finally onto all fours. The ground begins to bubble up, distort, extend, not just around my limbs, but taking on a life of its own, forming glutinous stalagmites. I search for the blue and red landscape I realise only now I’ve become familiar with, only to realise it’s gone, devoured by this sticky darkness. On my hands, the tar starts to sting, gently at first, then ever more incessantly. I have to go, but I don’t know how, or where. The stalagmites have formed a domed web over me, twisting into each other, an unbreakable net. There’s only one option. I take a deep breath and plunge head-first down, into the festering blackness.
To my surprise, once I’m in, it’s not thick at all. Unseen currents rip at my limbs, buffet me around like a ragdoll. I attempt to swim, to find some kind of current in the chaos, but I just get thrown around, over and over. Up, down, left, right – it doesn’t take long until I can no longer tell which way is up. My eyes are open, but I only see a green murkiness, uniform in all directions. My lungs start to sear in my chest, begging for air. I flail hopelessly against the furious liquid, tumbling, distracted, until by pure chance it seems, my head breaks the surface of the water. I draw a deep breath, but to my surprise it’s not relief I feel, only some strange kind of dispassionate acceptance that I have survived. I take a moment to look around – the river I’m in looks inky blue now, and has cast aside its anger in favour of a stately ambling pace. I allow myself to fall backward and float, looking up at the startles sky. There’s nothing here – no moon, no clouds, no far-off galaxies. I try to feel the stream with my fingers, and feel nothing at all. Dazed, I turn my head, and see that everything has dissolved into oneness. All around, all I see is deep velvet blue. Even I don’t seem to have a physical form anymore; I’m just sentience, and even my consciousness seems empty. I feel no surprise at this unusual situation, no fear, no joy, only a bland blue acceptance.
Incipient Chaos is the kind of album that creates a world I never want to leave – tortured, vast, unexplored, and so lonely, yet filled with such beauty, awe, and bittersweet heartache that to turn back now would be to deprive yourself of anything worth feeling. Every time it ends, I feel I’ve left a little bit of myself behind, there, in that world, that intricately manifested world that is, of course, filled with sound, but also lore, emotion, and breathless wonder. Evocative is a gross understatement.
I found this review fiendishly hard to write, and procrastinated it for weeks; firstly, because no amount of adjectives could even scratch the surface of what the album is actually like, and secondly, because it feels so monolithic that I was quite simply intimidated. On top of that, I found Incipient Chaos to be difficult to remember details of, like a dream that seems so real when you’re sleeping, and crumbles the moment you open your eyes. I felt I was grasping for something that was already gone, something I’d already lost. Luckily for me, I can remind myself whenever I want, and I certainly intend to. This is hands-down one of the finest black metal releases I’ve ever had the pleasure of putting into my ears. What an incredible release.
